09/06/2023 Mosstowie

Mosstowie 1975/1993 (40%, Gordon & MacPhail Connoisseurs Choice, IC/FG): nose: thirty years in the glass, and, with exactly zero surprise, that has imparted an obvious OME, this time not so much cardboard and pickled onion, more tins of shoe polish. Mind you, we also have gentian-vanilla ice cream (or softy, really), then mentholated tobacco, faded dried oregano, and lichen-covered planetree bark. That is right: it is surprisingly vegetal, for a few minutes. It does not take too long to open up, and soon, we have dried cherry slices to accompany darker tobacco and black coffee (a dodgy breakfast, if there ever was one). The whole fuses into something more cardboard-y, after all, which is fairly unexpected: traditionally, that impression is the initial one. It is only fleeting, though, quickly replaced by dried cranberries, dried cherries, and dried elderberries, still with a pinch of oily Semois tobacco. The second nose has more coffee and mocha, corrected with a dash of some liqueur -- my guess is cherry, but it may as well be orange (Cointreau style). The back of the sinuses picks up a fine eau-de-cologne -- Ispahan, perhaps. Finally, it has lichen on dry stave. Mouth: a gentle attack that soon displays fiery grated ginger on cardboard, yet that is made perfectly palatable by a generous dose of fruit (again, we are talking dried berries). The tongue detects a soft bitterness (chicory granules, fenugreek, annatto -- it is all granules, really!), in amongst pressed currants, chewy dried cherries, dried cranberries, and eucalyptus powder. The second mouth brings a drop of lychee juice blended with orange liqueur, and served warm. Cardboard is now reduced to a slightly-dusty bookshelf, and the afore-mentioned bitterness is limited to that of mixed peel. We still see a pinch of eucalyptus powder, but it is faint. Repeated sipping puts the emphasis on fruit again, a bowl of citrus (peel), elderberry and cherries, augmented with currants, and a thin layer of dust, showered with a thin liqueur. Finish: excellent. Cocoa powder now wrestles eucalyptus (and is winning), adding some sweetness to a clear-but-gentle bitterness. It now feels more chocolate-y and woody (sawdust) than overtly fruity, yet some of it remains, albeit more dried-cherry stems and currant stems than anything juicy. The second sip feels a lot more drying, with sawdust aplenty, or, indeed, eucalyptus powder, the sort one inhales to unclog one's nose. In the long run, the finish too turns more liqueur-like, fruity and fairly dry or bitter, so closer to Cointreau than anything completely saturated with oily sugars. This is very good. 8/10